Don't Give It All Away!

The very first time I sat down to write a tease I thought it would be simple: pick an important story and summarize it.

Man, was I wrong.

Teases are a little bit trickier than you think. You must say enough without giving it all away.  The best teases leave the viewers wanting more, and that's exactly what I strive to do when I write teases for the web. As the Web/Graphics teammate this week, I used social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to achieve this.

With Twitter it's especially a challenge, considering you are only allotted so many characters per post. You must keep it short and sweet.  For that reason, I actually think the character limit is beneficial. It forces you to really leave our Twitter followers wanting more. Because it is so concise, readers really want to go to our website and read all that they need to know.

When writing a tease, it's my job to drive our followers to our website to find out more about the story they're interested in.  Even better, our followers will not only check out the website, but they will tune in to our 6 p.m. newscast and get the full scoop.

At the end of the day, we want to sell our story and not tell our story.  The key is to ditch the headline summaries and compel those viewers to pay attention.